


open weaving

by CorvidFeathers



Category: Arthurian Mythology, Arthurian Mythology & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, Existential Woe, Fate & Destiny, Friendship, Gen, grievous and willful misuse of tennyson's arthurian canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:01:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28828575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidFeathers/pseuds/CorvidFeathers
Summary: Silver-gilt and greenweed.  Those were the threads you would always set to your loom, to try and fail to capture his likeness.One day, the silver knight from Elaine's mirror appears on the grounds of Astolat Castle.
Relationships: Lancelot du Lac & Elaine of Astolat, implied Lancelot/Arthur, implied Lancelot/Arthur/Guinevere
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	open weaving

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AgarthanGuide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgarthanGuide/gifts).



> This a birthday gift for my dear friend Hannah! Happy birthday!! 
> 
> I wanted to write a sort of companion piece to my other fic 'these sainted bones', since you found me through that story. It wandered a bit off from that but it still exists in the same canon, with slightly-fae Lancelot and his complicated relationships with Arthur and Guinevere.
> 
> So here's a little take on the Lady of Shallot / Elaine of Astolat and her story I wove for you! It borrows most heavily from Tennyson's two poems about Elaine- The Lady of Shallot and the 'Elaine and Lancelot' section of Idylls of the King. Elaine fascinates me and I wanted to try my hand at incorporating both versions of her story into something new that would play off of Lancelot's own story. 
> 
> shoutout to autocorrect that kept changing 'Astolat' to 'Astigmatism' when I was writing this
> 
> Content warning for the brief mention of Elaine of Corbenic.

You cannot look at the silver knight.

He’s here, a creature of flesh and blood, a pace behind you, not a pale vision in the glass or a creation woven of thread and dreams. 

Words rise in your throat, fluttering bird-like behind your closed lips, but you cannot open your mouth. 

He follows you through the halls of Astolat Castle. He has none of the usual platitudes; no words of your father’s hospitality, or your brothers’ prowess. Not even of your beauty. 

Your feet pause on the stairwell. 

The look over your shoulder isn’t quite a glance; all you see is the edge of his cloak. He’s stopped, still a pace behind you. 

If he gave you a thread of courtesy, you could speak. Words like that would give you some excuse to linger.

The silence is cold. You toe the step for a moment, and then start the long climb.

The mirrors that line the staircase are cracked with age, and the taper in your hands fills them with ghostly light. He follows behind you, a phantom in the mirrors, his steps surprisingly light for the armor he wears. You have to listen for the scuffing of metal on stone to remind yourself he’s actually there.

 _Silver-gilt and greenweed_. Those were the threads you would always set to your loom, to try and fail to capture his likeness. Silver-guilt and greenweed for his armor and the gleaming tumble of his hair, carmine and white for the device he bore. You can still feel the threads beneath your fingers, more real, more familiar than the cool stone beneath your feet.

At last, you reach the top of the tower, and the two doors. “In here,” you say, opening the door the guest chambers.

A fire is already crackling in the hearth, to ward off the spring chill, and the bed is piled high with furs and silk. You set down the robe on the bed, and turn back to the knight.

“Do you need help disarming?” you say. “I always help my brothers- or I can call a squire…?”

“No.” The word falls from his lips with a vehemence that makes you jump. He grimaces. “Thank you, my lady, but I will manage.”

You nod. 

It’s the moment when you should turn and leave. You can feel the pull on your limbs, your feet moving already, retracing your steps back to your own chambers.

“You’re Sir Lancelot.” The words fly from your mouth before you can stop them. You press a hand to your lips.

He flinches. “What?” For a moment, he looks just as he did when he came upon you in the woods: strange. Lost. Bewildered. “How…”

You still can’t look him full in the face for more than a moment, so you see the fear change to wariness in the lines of his shoulders, the way his hand twitches toward his sword for a moment. He takes a step back.

“Do I know you.” The words rasp against your ears, rough and harsh. In cracked glass above the hearth, his face shifts and twists, a smear of eggshell and gray and celandine warped and fragmented.

You look down at your slippers. Thread of gold and white, stitched with the petals of the lilies, by another’s hand. There was no use in teaching you anything but weaving, your mother always said. “No, sir. We’ve never met.”

“How do you know me, then? Your father doesn’t, nor do your brothers.”

You carry your own shield, Sir Lancelot, and all in Logres know it, you could say. What does it matter that he has it covered? When you found him in the woods, he was in no state to know if the covering had slipped.

But you’ve had no practice lying.

“There are things I’m cursed to know, Sir Lancelot,” you say. “But I will keep your confidence.”

You’re gone before he can question that, and propriety demands he does not follow.

Your pulse doesn’t slow until you’re sitting at your loom again.

* * *

A knock startles you from your work. You slipped out of time for a moment; the candle by your bed is smoldering in a puddle of wax, and outside, night has swallowed the sun. The heady perfume of an Astolat spring blows the drapes.

You pull your hands from the loom, and survey your work. The moon sinking low over a field of pavilions and banners, a tourney ground. Two young knights running at a tilt. You can see the dust kicking up beneath the heels of their chargers, their faces pale and ghostly in the batter silver of the mirror, but rendered with the flush of life in your weaving. You embellished, where you could. You never saw the full flush of life in the mirror; and try as you might, the vividness of the world outside slipped your mind as soon as your hands touched the loom. All you could do was embellish.

Another knock, quieter.

You go to the door. You know who will be on the other side.

In the dim light, the silver knight looks more collected. Almost the handsome rider who you had so loved to watch ride along the river. The dark red of his borrowed robe brings out the strange pallor of his hair and face. Not a single scar marks his features, or the smooth expanse of his neck.

He’s carrying his shield in his hands, still hidden in its covering of pale silk.

“I was rude, earlier,” he says. “I want to beg your pardon.” The words have a sort of dry, route quality to them, the words of a man who has never quite perfected courtliness he doesn’t feel. “I meant to apologize at supper, but you weren’t at the table.”

“I had weaving to do, sir,” you say. 

You still cannot seem to look him full in the face, but nor can you look away. 

You brace your hand against the door. The call of the loom sings in your blood. 

In its full force, the rest of the world fades to a gray rush of sound and shapes, and the only promise of color lies threaded in its shuttle.

“It’s no matter,” you say, quickly. “I understand you’re riding as a mystery knight. I won’t let it slip.”

“Yes. Well- I came to ask a favor, as well,” Lancelot says. “May I come in?”

You blink, and nod, cautiously, and take a step back. 

He steps into the room, still carrying his shield.

The colors of his hair catch in the mirror, bright silver against its tarnished gleam. Beside it, the loom, unattended. Calling to you.

You cross the room quickly and throw a cloth across the mirror’s face. He’s here now, really here.

Lancelot sets the shield against your chair, and pulls the covering from it, revealing battered diagonal strips of red on white. 

The sight sends a jolt through your chest, and makes your fingers twitch. How many times have you spun those arms into cloth?

“Your brother is graciously allowing me to borrow his shield and destrier,” he says. “I would ask you to keep my shield until I return. Since you know my identity already.” His lips curl into a small smile.

“Of course,” you say. “Not a perilous task.” 

His brows draw together. “You might be surprised what can be perilous.”

Lancelot’s gaze sweeps the room, passing over the hated things with no notice or recognition, and fixing on the weaving resting over your chair.

He steps closer, and studies the cloth, reaching to touch the figures of the jousting knights.

“Why are you entering in your own king’s tournament disguised?” you ask. 

He starts, and looks back at you. You drop your gaze, so your eyes won’t meet. “I… I told Arthur I wouldn’t enter,” he says, tracing the flowered edge of the field. “But I told Guinevere I would, and I’m sworn to both of them.”

“So why ride all the way to Astolat? You could have gotten a blank shield anywhere.”  
He hums in agreement, but doesn’t answer, looking at the tapestry again.

“This is Caerleon,” he says. “And here is Gareth, and Dinadan.” He runs his fingers over the flanks of the gray charger. “You have their likenesses perfectly. I gave this horse to Sir Gareth, not a season past. How-“ He shakes his head, and straightens. “Just what is the nature of your curse, my lady?” he asks at last. 

You sit on the edge of your bed, and rest your hands on your lap.

“If you’ve never been a guest at Astolat before, you never met my mother,” you say. “She spent almost her whole life in this tower, but she had a glass from which she could look out upon the whole of Logres. She used it to weave the most magnificent of tapestries- fantastic stories, chronicles. She would begin with a moment, and spin its whole history into the cloth.”

Lancelot nods.

“As a child, whenever I was willful, my father sent me to the tower, and my mother set me to weaving. I resented it at first, and then came to I love it. And then she was gone, and I realized there was… something else to it, in the moments when I could no longer will my hand from the shuttle.” You twists your hands together, digging your nails into the skin. “When I sit there… it’s as if the balance of the world rests in my hands,” you say. “If I took them from the loom, if I looked from the glass, I would… unravel. Or the world would.” You swallow. “It sounds outlandish-“

“No,” Lancelot says. “I know something of magic like that. Of making, and binding.” He sits down beside you. His movements are cautious, as if you’re a bird that might be startled into flight.

“When I was younger, I could leave the loom for days,” you say. A dull, scratchy throbbing has taken up residence behind your eyes, and when you blink, the tears well over. “Now… a few days, at most, and it takes all my will. One day… one day there will be nothing left of me but the parts that watch, and weave.”

Lancelot is a statue beside you, not quite touching you. 

“I can’t control what I see. Often, the figures are strange, events and happenings I can’t possibly understand. But over and over, I see you. Just glimpses. Riding along the river, with your companions, or lady, or alone-”

“I have no lady,” he says, softly, but he must know of who you speak, the woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a smile like a rose in bloom.

“-your banner fluttering at the point of your lance, off to win the king’s wars, to shape the turn of the world.” You smooth a hand over your dress. “You were… different from the others. I knew who you were- even in Astolat, we know of the flame of chivalry- but that wasn’t… why I was drawn to you.” You worry at your lip, weighing the next words. “I- I think often of how it would feel. To ride like that. To be unbound, unafraid, to see the furthest reaches of Logres as they are, instead of as shadows on glass.” 

You shake your head. “Sometimes I would imagine that I - I had a hand in it. That if I wove the threads of your armor well enough, it would guard you from blows, keep your hand steady.” Or sometimes you fancied you could weave your own set of armor, of silver-gilt and purple thread and go out after him.

Lancelot takes a slow breath. “I do not know your name, my lady.”

“Elaine,” you say. 

“Elaine?” A sound that is half-sob, half laugh comes strangled from his throat. “Of course.”

“Sir knight? Are you well?”

“Fine. Sick of fate, alone.” He waves you off. “That’s… a too-common name. Do you have another?”

“Another…?” You blink. “How many names should I have?”

“Any other,” he breathes. “Please.”

“My… they call me the lily maid,” you say. Your brothers did, and pinched your cheeks before they set out to hunts, or tourneys. Their lily maid. 

“Lily maid, then,” he says. “If you will humor me.” 

You never liked it before he said it aloud. You nod.

“My mother knew how to shape things too,” he says. “She forged the king’s sword beneath the waves of the lake-“

“Excalibur,” you breathe. 

He nods. “She shaped it for Arthur’s hand, to give him what he needed to rule. She shaped me in the same way. Raising me apart from the human world, so I would be… as I am.” He flexes a hand, his fingers moving stiffly, painfully, and then reaches out to take one yours. His hands are calloused, but there are no old sword-cuts, none of the ropy lines of scarring that your brothers began to collect as children. “I remember riding into Arthur’s warcamp for the first time, in the beginning, when things were far from certain. I was young, it was the first time I had ridden beyond the Lake, and I fell in love. With this world unfolding around me, with the summer-king, his fine brotherhood of knights, with the oaths I swore to them all. And they fell in love with me, and called me the best among them. From then on, I have been Arthur’s sword first and foremost. Arthur’s… and one other.”

He turns your hand between his. “I love them, I do. But… my role was shaped by magic, just like yours. That was the role I was shaped for, and sometimes it feels as if the bonds of that cut me so sharply I cannot live with it.”

“Oh.” 

You take another breath, and finally, you can look into his face. 

* * *

  
There’s little more meaning to the words you trade, but they spill out of you anyway, a torrent of the things you’ve kept locked away, the things he could never say as the flame of chivalry. 

Before you know it, the night is gone.

Lancelot arms in the dim light of the dawn. He dons his armor with the practiced ease of a lifetime.

You perch on the edge of the bed and examine the shield, stealing glances now and then at him. You want to touch him- just once more, for reassurance that he was here, that he existed in flesh and blood before he leaves the valley. But you run your hands over the shield instead. The wood is pitted and gashed, bearing all the visible scars he doesn’t. 

In your fascination, you can almost forget the pull of the loom.

“Lily maid-” he says, and you glance up. He’s grimacing, trying to reach the buckles for his breastplate. You jump to your feet, and help him. 

“I might be your squire,” you say, leaning up to adjust his pauldron. You’re nearly as tall as him- you never would have expected it.

“You’d make a fine one,” he says, and your heart twists, a painful, futile little paraclysm. “Though I expect your father would disapprove.”

“Would you wear my favor?” you ask. 

He stills. “I’ve never worn a lady’s favor,” he says, slowly.

“This once,” you say. “For me? I cannot leave, but- maybe it would bring you luck.”

* * *

You should have known better. You cannot touch the word. You cannot change the weaving; you’re there to watch, after all.

At first, you think it a joy that the mirror shows you the tournament, the flourish of steels and banners as Lancelot once again proves his reputation.

But by the day’s end, you’re weaving nothing but red, red, red.

* * *

There’s a knight riding among the lilies. His armor is wrought in gold gilt, but the shield he bears is as blank as the one Lancelot wore to the tourney.

Youths rode with blank shields, newly-made knights. But a blank shield carried by a knight with such a battered, worn helm meant something else entirely. 

Lancelot’s sword is resting against the stone, a pale sliver of silver in the shadows. If you caught it up-

Keep it from my reach, Lancelot had murmured, again and again, in his delirium. 

You lean over to pick it up. The sword is heavy in your hands, nothing like the light sliver of steel that Lancelot could make dance, and any idea of trying to fight off the knight dissolves. 

You step into the sunlight empty-handed.

The golden knight is swinging down from his charger, and takes you in with a tilt of his head. “Lady,” he calls. “I mean you no harm. Does a knight lie within, the knight who won the grand tourney?”

Lying isn’t your art. “Yes, sir knight,” you say. “He’s not well,” you say, your pulse quickening in your throat. “If you’ve come to settle some score-“ 

“There is no debt between me and him.” “Am I right to guess he is Lancelot?” the golden knight asks. His tone is even, his hands still on the reins. 

You lift your chin. “He never told me his name, sir,” you say. 

“You’re tending him?”

You nod. 

“Why? Such a knight could have- should have been healed by the king’s own surgeons, not fled to die like a wounded animal.” The knight’s even tone slips into a snarl, something raw and desperate bleeding through, and he slams a gauntleted fist against his leg. “Why would he hide? Why did he come to you?”

“I don’t know, sir.” 

The knight is silent for a long moment, and then his hands drops from the reins and he dismounts, stepping carefully among the lilies as he makes his way to the mouth of the cave. He walks like your father; with a gait that speaks of familiar pain.

He stops a respectful few steps from you. 

“It was your favor he bore in the tournament. The lilies.” The knight sweeps a hand over the field of lilies. “We all wondered, who the girl who finally convinced him to wear a favor is. Why such a girl wouldn’t honor us with her beauty.” You can feel his gaze on you, taking in the flyaway wisps of your hair, the bloodstained edges of your dress. You tore one of your sleeves to bind Lancelot’s wounds, and hadn’t thought to replace it.

“I’ve never left this valley, sir,” you say.

The golden knight pulls the helmet from his head, and you force yourself to look at the face beneath, to really look.

He has none of Lancelot’s delicate beauty, but his eyes shine like beaten gold. You can see why he has Lancelot’s devotion.

“Are you his love?”

Lancelot’s lady. A place. It would be easy. It would fit the rhythm of the weaving. If you spoke it aloud, would that make it so? You cannot command Lancelot’s love, but no one can discount the power of love unreturned.

Lancelot’s words thread through your mind. Fevered lips spilling names and battles you only know as tapestries of your mother’s weavings. The haunted way he spoke the name that he refused to call you.

Then, your own name. Lily maid, he would say, looking at you with such weariness. We were both crafted by magic.

“No,” you say. 

Imperceptibly, the knight relaxes. “I must speak to him.” He goes to step past you.

Before you can think, you catch up Lancelot’s sword, and put yourself between the knight and the cave. You wrap a hand around the unsharpened length of blade near the hilt to steady the way it trembles in your hands.

The knight stops, his hand going to his own blade for a moment before it falls away. “My lady-” he begins.

“You cannot,” you say, drawing yourself up. “He came here for a reason. Not to the court and not to the- not to you. I don’t know what the reason is, but I know I will defend it.”

In the stillness, the birds seem to redouble their song, and it echoes through your mind is as an incessant, mocking chatter. Is this the part of the story where the wicked knight strikes down the maiden? It could be your mother’s voice, weaving through your mind. This isn’t your role, girl.

“Please.” The word slips your lips before you can stop it.

The golden knight’s hand falls from his sword- it’s like no other sword you’ve ever seen- and he sighs. “You needn’t defend Lancelot from me,” he says. “I’m his-”

“That might be so,” you say. “But he cannot speak his own will, now, and he trusted me to guard him.”

His smile is rueful. “Very well. I know when I am beat.” He has a smile like the sun. 

“I see why Lancelot took a liking to you,” he says, as he mounts his horse. “You must convince him to take you to court. A lady like you would be well-received, and I would be remiss if I didn’t reward such constancy.”

“I need no reward,” you say. “I’m not doing it for you.”

He has a smile like the sun, but he hides it quickly under his helm. “Do you know who I am, maid?”

Maybe your mother captured his likeness, kneeling before the ancient stone, kneeling under the crown. But there are many knights with wide smiles and golden eyes. “You never told me your name,” you say, and return to Lancelot’s side.


End file.
